New York Falls and Seattle Rises on ‘America’s Top Tech Cities’ List

CRBE has released their annual list of the top tech cities in the U.S., analyzing 13 metrics (including salaries and housing costs) to “gauge the competitive advantage of markets and their ability to attract, grow and retain tech-talent pools.” An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes an article from Geekwire:

Seattle is the third best tech market in North America, trailing only the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington D.C…. Seattle passed New York for third this year on the back of a growing, well-paid and well-educated class of tech employees and a strong roster of big companies…with New York and Austin rounding out the top five.

The report shows a big divide in Seattle between a prosperous tech community and everyone else. Tech workers in Seattle make $110,999 on average, and their wages have increased close to 20 percent since 2010… The 177,380 people who work in other professional fields like finance, sales and marketing make an average of $57,603 per year and their wages have only increased 6.3 percent since 2010. During that same time period, apartment rents increased 39 percent to an average of $1,619 a month.

San Francisco had the highest annual salary for tech workers — $123,921 — followed by Seattle, which also had the highest percentage of workers with at least a bachelor’s degree — 59%. And there’s also an interesting second list of the top small tech markets, which is led by Columbus, Ohio followed by Charlotte, North Carolina, and Portland, Oregon.